Category: Anarchism

In the current stage of late capitalism, the figure of the tech billionaire has taken on an almost theological dimension. They are portrayed as visionaries, geniuses, men (almost always men) whose innovations will rescue us from ecological collapse, social fragmentation, and the limits of human biology itself. They promise immortality through AI, peace through crypto, and utopia through deregulated digital governance. But behind the thin veneer of progress and innovation lies a disturbing reality: these men are not building a better world, they are preparing to rule over its ruins.

In a recent episode of Decoder, journalist Gil Duran lays bare what he terms “The Nerd Reich” – a loosely connected but ideologically coherent group of tech billionaires and venture capitalists who are quietly waging war on democratic institutions, collective decision-making, and the very idea of egalitarianism. The interview, rich in insight and dripping with alarm, deserves to be read not merely as a critique of individual arrogance but as a glimpse into the structural death drive of capital. A system that, in its desperation to preserve elite control, is birthing a new form of digital feudalism.

For those of us who stand within the anarcho-communist tradition, this emerging constellation of authoritarian tech-libertarianism is neither surprising nor novel. It is the logical conclusion of a society where wealth is treated as wisdom, ownership as virtue, and control over digital infrastructure as a divine right. What Duran calls “The Nerd Reich,” we might more precisely name techno-neofascism, a ruling class project to resurrect hierarchical domination in sleek black turtlenecks and smart contracts.

From Libertarianism to Autocracy – The Dark Enlightenment Arrives

At the intellectual centre of this movement is a web of reactionary thought cloaked in technological jargon. Duran highlights the influence of Curtis Yarvin (also known by his blog pseudonym “Mencius Moldbug”), a former software engineer turned political philosopher of the so-called “Dark Enlightenment”. Yarvin openly advocates for the dismantling of democracy and its replacement with a kind of “CEO monarchy,” in which a single, unaccountable ruler efficiently governs a polity as if it were a startup.

It is difficult to overstate how grotesque this vision is. Yarvin’s contempt for the “unproductive, which often maps onto the disabled, the racialised, the poor, recalls the most violent projects of eugenics and colonial domination. He has casually proposed turning these people into biodiesel or locking them into VR environments to be managed as livestock. This is not satire. It is class war waged as fantasy, and it is no accident that such ideas find resonance among the likes of Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman.

These men are not merely building apps and platforms. They are attempting to build states, or more accurately, to replace states with corporate governance models. Whether it is Thiel bankrolling far-right political candidates, Musk using Twitter (now X) to shape political discourse, or Andreessen pouring millions into projects that aim to “exit” from democratic society entirely, the trajectory is clear. This is not an eccentric ideological fringe. It is the direction of capitalist power itself in an era where traditional mechanisms of state legitimacy are in crisis.

The Rise of the Network State – Capital’s Final Utopia

One of the most chilling developments in this landscape is the increasing popularity of the “network state” concept—a kind of digital micronation built on blockchain governance, bypassing traditional regulatory frameworks. Popularised by Balaji Srinivasan, the network state is presented as a liberatory alternative to the inefficiencies of the nation-state. In reality, it is the digital equivalent of a walled estate, where capital rules without interference and where citizenship is reduced to a subscription model.

In Honduras, Prospera – a private charter city backed by U.S. tech investors – has already begun implementing this model. In Greenland, a startup called Praxis aims to build a city for “like-minded people” (read rich libertarians) with its own governance, currency, and laws. Closer to home, Duran recounts how a major Silicon Valley firm attempted to declare a “national security emergency” to bypass local environmental laws and construct a private city on an old military base in California.

This is the logical endpoint of a capitalist system that no longer needs mass participation. Having outsourced production, financialised labour, and automated much of its value extraction, capital now seeks to secede from humanity itself. The network state is not a fantasy of freedom. It is a blueprint for a neo-feudal dystopia, in which the population is divided into those who own code and those who are owned by it.

The Alliance with Fascism: MAGA, Musk, and Emergency Powers

In case this seems abstract, Duran draws attention to the very real and immediate political alliances forming between the tech elite and authoritarian political movements. Musk’s open alignment with MAGA discourse, Thiel’s financing of Trumpist candidates, and the broader silence of Silicon Valley in the face of growing far-right movements signal a dangerous convergence.

Duran warns that should Trump or another autocratic figure seize power again in the United States, many tech leaders would not resist. They would likely collaborate, seeing in the rollback of democratic norms an opportunity to fast-track their vision of corporate governance. In this alliance, executive emergency powers become tools not for managing crisis, but for realising dreams of total control.

This is not merely opportunism. It is a marriage of convenience between two factions of the ruling class – the decaying fossil of traditional nationalism, and the sleek, data-driven autocracy of the digital elite. Together, they form a hybrid authoritarianism that is both technologically advanced and ideologically regressive – a kind of cybernetic fascism in which dissent is algorithmically filtered and obedience is gamified.

The Technocratic Death Cult: Why the Billionaires Hate Democracy

Why do these men hate democracy? The answer, as always, is that democracy limits their power. Even in its degraded liberal form, democratic governance imposes taxes, regulations, environmental protections, and, worst of all, popular demands for redistribution. For men who have grown used to absolute control within their companies, the idea that a waitress in Des Moines should have equal say in shaping the future as a venture capitalist in Menlo Park is offensive.

But more fundamentally, they see history not as a collective process but as a canvas for their will. In this, they echo the fascist contempt for mass politics and the belief in a natural hierarchy of men. Their preferred future is not a stateless society, but a society in which they are the state. Where their platforms mediate all relationships, their currencies govern all transactions, and their ideologies shape all narratives.

This is what Duran rightly identifies as the “Nerd Reich.” It is a ruling class fantasy of digital totalitarianism, cloaked in the language of innovation and disruption, but animated by the same lust for domination that fuelled colonialism, fascism, and genocide. It is a future in which your landlord is a DAO, your cop is an AI drone, and your government is a startup. And it must be abolished before it is built.

Anarcho-Communist Counterpower: Beyond Resistance, Toward Reconstruction

For Duran, the answer lies in awareness, media exposure, and restoring faith in democratic institutions. While these are necessary steps, they are not sufficient. The tech elite cannot be shamed into submission. They cannot be voted out or regulated into decency. Their power flows not from popularity but from private ownership of infrastructure, and that power must be seized, dismantled, and replaced.

Anarcho-communism offers not only a critique but a program of reconstruction. Where the Nerd Reich offers techno-feudalism, we propose technological mutual aid – open-source tools, federated platforms, worker-owned co-ops, autonomous zones of care and resistance. Where they build network states to exclude, we want digital commons to include. Where they see in automation a way to manage populations, we see in it the possibility of reducing alienated labour and freeing people to pursue lives of dignity and joy.

But we must act quickly. Every year that passes sees deeper entrenchment of platform monopolies, more widespread deployment of surveillance tools, and more ideological capture of the public imagination. We must not only fight back, but we must build the world we want in the cracks of the one they are trying to control.

No Tech Lords, No Masters

Gil Duran’s analysis is essential, urgent, and courageous. But we must take it further. The Nerd Reich is not simply a threat to democracy. It is a threat to life itself. In its attempt to render society programmable, it reduces human beings to data points, social relations to transaction costs, and the Earth to an input-output system. It is, in short, capital in its purest, most death-driven form.

Anarcho-communists must not only expose this horror. It must offer an escape from it, a refusal, a new direction. We must abolish the Nerd Reich not because it is a failed vision, but because it is a successful nightmare. Against their future of domination, we offer a future of solidarity. Against their hierarchies, we offer horizontal care. Against their algorithmic fascism, we offer collective freedom.

We don’t want better tech billionaires.

We want no billionaires at all.

The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand, long considered the progressive conscience of Parliament, has proposed an Income Guarantee, a universal, unconditional payment that would replace or simplify several parts of the welfare system. Framed as a liberating policy to reduce poverty, support unpaid labour, and prepare for a future where work may be scarcer, it has garnered enthusiastic support among progressives. But this proposal is not the radical solution it pretends to be.

Instead, it reflects a greenwashed attempt to stabilise capitalism by offering just enough relief to avoid revolt. Far from challenging the structural roots of inequality, private property, wage labour, and capitalist accumulation, the Green Party’s UBI functions as a sedative, dulling the sharp edges of exploitation while entrenching the system that causes it. The Green Party’s UBI is a reformist containment strategy, not a pathway to liberation. Its implementation would cushion the worst aspects of capitalist life, but in doing so, it would pacify resistance, entrench private ownership, and ultimately protect the interests of capital.

What the Greens Propose

In 2023, the Green Party unveiled a rebranded version of UBI called the Income Guarantee. This scheme offers:

-A weekly payment of at least NZD $385 to all adults not in paid work, including students and carers.
-Higher rates for single parents and families with children.
-A restructuring of existing welfare benefits, replacing Jobseeker, Sole Parent Support, and Working for Families with a unified baseline payment.
-A new agency (replacing ACC) to guarantee 80% of minimum wage for those unable to work due to illness or disability.
-No work obligations, sanctions, or means-testing for this baseline.

The Greens frame this as a way to value unpaid work, decouple survival from employment, and support dignity in a time of rising precarity. They also claim that it simplifies bureaucracy and builds trust in people to use the payment in ways that work for their lives.

But while these ideas may seem empowering on paper, they carry deep contradictions, particularly when implemented within a capitalist framework.

Reforming the System That Creates Poverty

The first and most glaring issue with the Greens’ Income Guarantee is that it leaves intact the very system that causes poverty and precarity in the first place. People are not poor because there is no universal income; they are poor because the means of production, land, housing, food, energy, are privately owned and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

By funnelling a state stipend into a market dominated by landlords, bosses, and corporate monopolies, the Greens’ UBI model subsidises capital, not challenges it. The landlord still sets the rent. The supermarket still sets the price of bread. The corporation still determines wages and hours. A “universal income” becomes a universal transfer of public money to private pockets.

This is not wealth redistribution, it’s redistribution of dependency. The Greens imagine that by putting cash in your pocket, they are empowering you. But as long as that cash has to pass through the hands of property owners and profiteers, it simply recirculates back into the capitalist machine.

Flat Payments in an Unequal World

The Green Party’s rhetoric of “universality” masks a dangerous flattening of difference. By giving the same baseline income to all regardless of need, the policy shifts away from needs-based welfare to a market-mediated minimalism.

This sounds fair on the surface, but it has regressive implications. A wealthy investor and a single parent receive the same base rate. Meanwhile, tailored supports for disability, illness, or chronic hardship are pared back, replaced with a one-size-fits-all payment that ignores the complexity of human need.

While the Greens claim that specialised supports would still exist, the logic of simplification, driven by administrative efficiency and cost, risks future erosion of more expensive targeted benefits. This is not an idle concern. Across the world, UBI experiments have been used to justify welfare cutbacks, particularly under conservative governments that follow.

In the long run, a flat payment becomes an excuse to individualise poverty, treating everyone the same while leaving structural inequalities untouched.

UBI as Austerity in Disguise

UBI can become a tool of austerity, not generosity. By packaging welfare reform as “universal empowerment,” the state absolves itself of responsibility for meeting complex needs. It shifts risk back onto the individual giving them a cash payment, but removing the broader safety net that once protected people from market volatility.

In practice, this leads to privatised hardship – disabled people navigating inaccessible housing markets on a flat income; sole parents forced to stretch meagre funds across rent, food, transport, and children’s needs; sick workers unable to afford care once the specialised benefits disappear.

UBI may be universal, but its effects are not equal. It entrenches the neoliberal logic that you are responsible for surviving the system, even as the system remains rigged against you.

The Work Fetish in Reverse

A key selling point of the Green UBI is that it allows people to work less and to study, care for whanāu, volunteer, create art, or simply rest. This is undeniably attractive. For many, the dream of decoupling survival from employment is liberatory.

However, UBI doesn’t abolish work, it just reorganises who gets to do less of it. The means of production still belong to someone else. People may reduce hours or leave exploitative jobs but they still must buy back access to life from those who own it. Without seizing control of land, housing, food systems, and workplaces, UBI only offers a slower treadmill, not a way off.

True liberation from work requires not just the absence of compulsion, but the presence of collective power to shape what, how, and why we produce. Under capitalism, UBI is not freedom from work it is still just freedom to consume what others profit from.

Automation and the Myth of Post-Work Capitalism

Another justification for UBI is the coming wave of automation. As jobs are replaced by AI and machines, we are told, we need a universal income to ensure people aren’t left behind.

This argument is both outdated and naïve. Automation is not new it has always accompanied capitalism. And rather than freeing us from labour, it has consistently resulted in:

-Job displacement for the many,
-Wealth concentration for the few,
-And a race to the bottom for those still working.

Without changing the ownership of technology and the surplus it generates, automation becomes a weapon against workers, not a liberation. UBI does not challenge this, it merely proposes a bribe to stay quiet while the rich get richer from robotic productivity.

If we want automation to free us, we must demand common ownership of its fruits, not a state-managed allowance.

Depoliticising the Class Struggle

UBI has a profoundly depoliticising function. By providing everyone a basic income, it suggests that class conflict can be solved through technocratic redistribution, rather than collective struggle. It individualises economic survival and replaces mutual aid with state-administered charity.

The Greens often present this as “trusting people.” But in truth, it is a move away from politics altogether, away from strikes, occupations, assemblies, and direct action. It encourages people to become passive consumers of state policy rather than active agents of transformation.

This is no accident. UBI fits comfortably within the liberal logic of non-confrontational progressivism – small gains, managed well, with no need to question who owns what or why.

But anarcho-communists know that liberation is not granted it is seized. The abolition of wage labour, rent, and bosses does not come from a Treasury paper. It comes from resistance, solidarity, and revolt.

The Green Fetish for Policy Without Revolution

Ultimately, the Green Party’s UBI is a reflection of their broader political project – a capitalism with a conscience. Their aim is to regulate, reform, and humanise the existing system not to overturn it.

This is the great tragedy of Green politics: it mobilises the language of justice to protect the architecture of oppression. They speak of liberation while fearing confrontation. They dream of balance sheets, not barricades.

The Income Guarantee is not a step toward socialism. It is a safety valve for capitalism, designed to prevent breakdown by making survival just bearable enough to forestall uprising.

As long as the Greens seek legitimacy in Parliament, they will remain managers of compromise, not agents of emancipation.

Toward a Real Alternative

Anarcho-communists do not oppose the idea of everyone having their needs met. But we reject the idea that this must come in the form of a wage or income. We do not want better access to markets we want a world without them.

Imagine a society where housing is free because it is collectively owned. Where food is grown and shared in community gardens, not bought. Where care work is respected and supported through mutual aid, not commodified. Where education, transport, and health are decommodified. Where people work not for profit, but for one another.

This is not utopia. It exists in fragments already in marae, solidarity kitchens, workers’ co-ops, and mutual aid networks. These are the embryos of a post-capitalist future.

We don’t need a basic income. We need basic expropriation. We need the end of property, not its pacification.

No Wages, No Compromise

The Green Party’s UBI plan, however well-intentioned, is not a solution to poverty. It is a reformist illusion, an elegant attempt to stabilise a decaying system without addressing the violence at its core. It replaces welfare with technocracy, struggle with dependence, and solidarity with state charity.

We say: No wages. No landlords. No bosses. No income guarantees only freedom from all need for income at all.

We do not ask for a universal basic income.

We demand a universal reclaiming of life itself.

The latest figures from the 2025 UBS Global Wealth Report confirm a fact that many of us live every day but are rarely encouraged to fully name: the world is not merely unequal; it is grotesquely and systemically so. Just 1.6% of the world’s adult population now controls 48.1% of all personal wealth. That amounts to about 60 million individuals holding $226 trillion in net worth, while the bottom half of the global population – nearly four billion people – share less than 1% of all personal wealth. This is not a failure of the system. It is the system.

In capitalist mythology, wealth is presumed to be the natural outcome of hard work, innovation, or risk-taking. But the sheer scale of this concentration defies any such moral logic. We are not talking about millionaires flourishing due to their talent or thrift. We are dealing with a global oligarchy, a structure of domination so entrenched that it renders the daily struggles of most of the world’s population invisible or irrelevant in the eyes of power. To make sense of this arrangement, we must strip away the illusions of meritocracy, reform, and nationalist development, and instead see capitalism for what it is – a machinery for the extraction and concentration of wealth, backed by state violence, debt coercion, and ideological mystification.

This article is based on the findings presented in Michael Roberts’ summary of the Global Wealth Report . We argue that wealth inequality is not a by-product of mismanagement or corruption, but the predictable and necessary outcome of capitalist property relations. Any attempt to “redistribute” wealth within the bounds of existing state and market frameworks is doomed to fail, not because redistribution is impossible, but because capitalism requires inequality as its central organising principle.

Capitalist Accumulation and the Architecture of Inequality

The UBS report maps what it calls the “global wealth pyramid”, an illustration of class war from above. According to the data, 82% of the world’s adults, 3.1 billion people own just 12.7% of global wealth, placing them in the “middle and lower strata” of the pyramid. At the same time, the top 18.2% (680 million people) control a staggering 87.3% of all personal assets. This means that the vast majority of human labour, time, care, creativity, and sacrifice is ultimately converted into value that benefits an elite minority.

In Roberts’ summary, he rightly highlights the role of financial assets, stocks, bonds, derivatives, in driving inequality. This reflects a deeper shift in capitalism since the 1970s – a movement from industrial capital to financial capital, from the factory floor to the stock exchange, from exploitation through production to exploitation through speculation. In 2024 alone, global financial wealth grew by 6.2%, while real property wealth grew by only 1.7%. In other words, the rich got richer simply by owning the instruments of capital, while the rest of us slogged through stagnant wages, debt burdens, rising rents, and environmental collapse.

This is not wealth as most people understand it, homes, savings, or personal security. It is wealth as control, over markets, states, livelihoods, and futures. It is wealth as a weapon.

The Geography of Exploitation

The global wealth distribution also exposes the regional dimensions of capitalist inequality. North America and Eastern Europe saw the largest increases in wealth last year, while Latin America, Oceania, and Western Europe experienced declines. On average, a North American adult holds almost six times more wealth than a Chinese adult, twelve times more than someone in Eastern Europe, and nearly twenty times more than a Latin American adult.

But regional averages obscure class dynamics. The top 1.6% of wealthy individuals are scattered globally. They may reside in different countries, but they inhabit the same class – a transnational bourgeoisie whose loyalty is to capital, not community, and whose interests are preserved through military alliances, trade agreements, and international financial institutions. Whether they are oligarchs in Moscow, bankers in Zurich, tech moguls in San Francisco, or real estate tycoons in Auckland, they benefit from the same underlying system of dispossession.

This is why appeals to “national development” or “economic patriotism” ring hollow. No nation, however rhetorically independent, can insulate itself from the logic of accumulation without fundamentally breaking with capitalism itself. The wealth gap is not merely between the Global North and South, but between owners and non-owners, between capital and life.
Debt, Discipline, and the Myth of Opportunity

Roberts’ figures focus on net worth – assets minus liabilities – but the centrality of debt to the global wealth system deserves sharper attention. For the majority of the global population, debt is not a tool of investment, but a mechanism of control. People borrow to survive, to pay rent, buy food, access healthcare, get an education. Meanwhile, the wealthy use debt as leverage, a way to multiply their capital, avoid taxes, and speculate with other people’s futures.

Debt enforces discipline. It ensures compliance, obedience, and docility. A person in debt cannot strike. A person in debt cannot relocate, protest, or say no to exploitation. Debt is the modern chain, and it binds workers as surely as any physical shackle.

Moreover, the capitalist system sells the myth that upward mobility is possible for anyone who works hard enough. But the wealth data makes clear that mobility is the exception, not the rule. Capital begets capital. The rich have access to compound interest, diversified portfolios, and tax havens. The poor have payday loans, rising rents, and wage theft.

This isn’t just about inequality. It’s about entrapment.

State and Capital: Partners in Plunder

It would be naïve to assume that this wealth concentration occurred in a vacuum, or in spite of governments. In reality, states are key partners in the preservation and expansion of capitalist inequality. Through tax cuts for the rich, bank bailouts, privatisation, austerity, and militarised policing, governments in both liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes ensure that the rules remain stacked in favour of capital.

Even where progressive reforms are introduced,welfare programs, wealth taxes, public housing, they are often eroded over time, captured by elites, or restricted by legal frameworks designed to protect private property above all else.

This is not accidental. The capitalist state does not exist to serve “the people.” It exists to guarantee the conditions necessary for capital accumulation, and to suppress any serious threats to that accumulation. Courts, police, prisons, and parliaments are not neutral institutions, they are class instruments. Their primary role is to maintain the legitimacy and smooth functioning of capitalist rule, even when dressed in democratic robes.

Beyond Redistribution: The Case for Abolition

Faced with such staggering inequality, liberal reformers often call for redistribution through wealth taxes, basic income, progressive taxation, or stakeholder capitalism. While some of these policies might alleviate immediate suffering, they ultimately leave the core structure of exploitation intact.

Redistribution assumes that the problem is one of outcomes, not origins. But the problem is ownership itself, the private ownership of the means of life. As long as housing, health, education, energy, land, and information are privately owned and controlled, then wealth will continue to flow upward, no matter how clever the tax code.

What we need is not redistribution, but abolition. We must dismantle the structures, legal, financial, and ideological, that make it possible for one person to own the labour and life of another. This means expropriating landlords, cancelling debt, eliminating inheritance, and building new systems based on cooperation, mutual aid, and horizontal decision-making.

It also means rejecting the illusion that states can deliver liberation. History shows us that even leftist governments, when operating within the capitalist framework, become tools of compromise and co-optation. True emancipation must come from below through direct action, popular assemblies, federated communes, and mass refusal.

Imagining the World to Come

The figures from the UBS report are chilling, but they also reveal the cracks in the system. If a tiny elite can hoard nearly half the planet’s wealth, then that wealth is not invincible. It is vulnerable. It is located. It can be seized, reappropriated, and transformed.

The path forward is not easy. It requires organisation, courage, and solidarity across borders and identities. It requires rebuilding the social fabric shredded by decades of neoliberal atomisation. But it is possible.

Imagine a world where housing is a right, not an asset. Where energy is produced by cooperatives for need, not profit. Where no one is in debt for being sick, educated, or alive. Where care is collective, decisions are democratic, and wealth is measured not in dollars but in joy, security, and shared abundance.

Such a world cannot coexist with the wealth pyramid. It must be levelled — not just through policy, but through revolution.

Michael Roberts’ analysis of global wealth inequality confirms what anarcho-communists have long known: capitalism is not broken; it is working exactly as intended. It creates wealth for the few by extracting value from the many. It relies on debt, exploitation, and state violence to preserve this order. And it is incapable of delivering justice, equality, or freedom.

The only way forward is to dismantle the architecture of accumulation and replace it with systems rooted in solidarity, not scarcity; cooperation, not competition; freedom, not coercion.

The time has come to abolish the pyramid.

In a recent piece for Stuff, veteran journalist Paddy Gower expressed his delight at Jeff Bezos’s multimillion-dollar wedding and dismissed criticism of a proposed billionaire helipad in Williams-Mowbray. His closing line, “I just want more billionaires” was not satire. It was offered in earnest, a confession of desire for more wealth, more luxury, more power, imported into Aotearoa under the guise of economic development.

There’s something deeply revealing in this. Gower, promoted as a hard-hitting political reporter, is using his platform to openly cheer for the ultra-rich. But he’s not alone. His article is symptomatic of a broader media culture in Aotearoa that increasingly embraces wealth as spectacle, celebrates elite consumption, and dismisses grassroots resistance to capitalist encroachment as trivial or naive.

As anarcho-communists, we reject this narrative entirely. We don’t want more billionaires. We want none. We want a world without exploitation, without elite land grabs, without jetsetters carving up our whenua for their private pleasure. Gower’s article isn’t just tone-deaf, it’s an ideological endorsement of everything we’re fighting to dismantle.

The Wedding as Spectacle

Gower begins with a flourish, “I loved the Bezos wedding.” He confesses a guilty pleasure in watching the absurdly extravagant nuptials unfold. But this kind of “guilty pleasure” is far from harmless. When the ultra-rich throw grandiose, hyper-consumptive events, they aren’t just celebrating, they are asserting a global social order. The message is clear – the world exists to serve their fantasies, no matter the cost to climate, labour, or community.

This is not an apolitical spectacle. It’s a performance of domination.

Billionaires like Bezos do not simply accumulate wealth; they reshape cities, supply chains, and entire planetary ecosystems in their image. Their weddings, yachts, and rockets are not just excess, they are material expressions of a system that demands the dispossession of the many for the pleasure of the few.

When Gower celebrates such events as entertainment, he normalises that dispossession. He teaches us not to question it. He trains our attention on the dazzling surface, away from the violence that sustains it.

The Helipad Debate: A Case of Local Resistance

Later in the article, Gower waves away concerns about the proposed helipad development on Wellington’s green belt, part of the Williams-Mowbray estate. The development would allow billionaires to bypass the city and land directly in their luxury enclave, quietly circumventing public processes, environmental concerns, and community input.

To Gower, this is unimportant, a “non-issue.” But that’s easy to say from the comfort of media celebrity, far removed from the daily grind of renters, workers, and tangata whenua defending their right to access and care for the land.

The helipad controversy is not about envy or tall poppy syndrome, as Gower claims. It is about power, the power of the wealthy to reconfigure public space for private convenience, and the creeping erosion of collective control over our shared environment. It is about the widening chasm between those who move through the world by helicopter, and those who catch three buses and still can’t afford the rent.

To dismiss this as a side show is to side with enclosure. It is to say, implicitly, that the rich should be free to do what they like, and the rest of us should shut up and watch.

“I Just Want More Billionaires”: The Ideology Behind the Statement

At the heart of Gower’s piece is this astonishing admission, “I just want more billionaires.” He offers this not as critique or irony, but as aspiration. In his view, billionaires bring glamour, jobs, capital. They are, somehow, the answer to what ails Aotearoa.

Let’s unpack this fantasy.

What does it mean to want more billionaires? It means welcoming further concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a tiny elite. It means embracing a system where the fortunes of a few come at the expense of the many. It means approving the logic of private jets, mega-mansions, and speculative capital while ordinary people live in cars, shelters, or overcrowded flats.

To want more billionaires is to want more inequality.

It is also to want less democracy. Billionaires don’t just consume, they dominate. They fund political parties, shape media narratives, and lobby against taxation, regulation, and workers’ rights. They hollow out the commons while selling us their philanthropy as salvation.

And in Aotearoa, they bring with them a colonial logic – that the land is there to be bought, fenced off, and enjoyed by the rich. That whenua is just real estate, to be accessed by helicopter if needed. That local voices, including Māori ones, are to be tolerated only when convenient.

Gower’s desire for more billionaires is not a neutral preference. It is an invitation to intensify capitalist enclosure, environmental destruction, and social hierarchy.

Against the Spectacle: What We Really Need

We don’t need more billionaires. We need fewer landlords. We need more public housing. We need universal access to healthcare and education. We need food sovereignty, community-owned energy, and the return of stolen land. We need an economic system that values people over profit, life over luxury.

In short, we need a rupture with the capitalist order Gower celebrates.

This isn’t about jealousy or moralism. It’s about survival. We are living through climate collapse, a housing crisis, and spiralling mental health epidemics, all driven in large part by the economic system that produces billionaires. Their accumulation is not incidental to our suffering. It is its cause.

Billionaires are not just rich individuals. They are structural expressions of capitalism’s failure to meet human and ecological needs. Their very existence is incompatible with a just society.

To challenge them is not to indulge envy – it is to defend our lives.

Media and the Manufacture of Consent

That a prominent journalist would so brazenly advocate for billionaire expansion is revealing. It tells us something about the role of mainstream media in contemporary Aotearoa – not as a check on power, but as its marketing wing.

Rather than scrutinising wealth, much of the media now celebrates it. Rather than platforming the voices of workers, renters, or tangata whenua, it obsesses over real estate portfolios, luxury developments, and the movements of tech oligarchs.

This is not accidental. Media outlets are increasingly owned, influenced, or funded by capital. Their revenue models depend on advertising and corporate access. And their cultural sensibility is shaped by the worldviews of the comfortable, not the struggling.

What Gower offers, then, is not a rogue opinion, it is a distilled version of a dominant ideology. One that says progress comes from above, from the rich, from overseas. One that sees democracy as obstruction, and community concerns as noise.

As anarcho-communists, we reject this utterly. We believe in bottom-up media, rooted in community, accountable to the people, committed to truth and liberation. We need stories that lift up resistance, not consumption; that challenge wealth, not flatter it.

The Path Forward: Build Collective Power

What, then, is to be done?

We must organise. At the community level, we can fight billionaire encroachment, be it helipads, luxury developments, or speculative land grabs. We can demand participatory planning processes, environmental protections, and respect for Māori sovereignty.

At the economic level, we must build alternatives: housing co-operatives, workers’ collectives, mutual aid networks, and public commons that operate outside of profit logics. We must push for wealth taxes, land reform, and the decommodification of essential services.

And at the cultural level, we must reject the spectacle. We must unlearn the worship of wealth and embrace a politics of solidarity. The Bezos wedding is not a dream, it is a distraction from everything that matters.

We can no longer afford to be dazzled.

Aotearoa Beyond Billionaires

Paddy Gower’s article is not just a one-off opinion, it is a symptom of a deeper sickness in our culture. A sickness that equates wealth with worth, privilege with progress, domination with development.

But another Aotearoa is possible. One where land is held in common. One where resources are shared. One where power flows from the people, not from capital. One where community, not consumption, is the measure of success.

We don’t want more billionaires. We want liberation from the system that creates them.

And that liberation begins not in media boardrooms or luxury wedding venues, but in the streets, the unions, the collectives, and the whenua, where people still fight, still organise, still believe in a world without billionaires at all.

Be your own boss.
Disrupt the system.
Chase your passion.
Monetise your dream.

These are the slogans of a society desperately trying to convince itself that freedom can be found inside a cage—as long as you decorate the bars with your own logo.

In today’s capitalist dystopia, entrepreneurship is sold as a way out. Out of poverty, out of dead-end jobs, out of oppression. If you hustle hard enough, brand yourself well enough, and get on the right side of an algorithm, you too can escape the grind. You can be “free.” You can win.

But anarcho-communists know better. Entrepreneurship is not a challenge to capitalism, it is one of its most seductive lies. It promises empowerment while deepening alienation. It markets autonomy while reinforcing exploitation. It encourages people to internalise the system’s logic, calling it creativity.

This critique of entrepreneurship culture is not because we don’t believe in creativity, initiative, or self-determination, but because we want those things freed from the profit motive, private property, and market discipline. We don’t want to be our own bosses. We want no bosses.

The Entrepreneur as Myth: From Barbed Wire to Business School

Capitalism has always needed myths to justify itself. The entrepreneur is one of its most powerful.

The idea is simple: a self-made individual with vision, hustle, and courage builds something from nothing. It’s the rags-to riches story rebooted for the age of TikTok and TED Talks. The entrepreneur doesn’t exploit, they innovate. They don’t dominate, they inspire.

But this is a lie.

Historically, many of the first “entrepreneurs” were slave owners, colonisers, and war profiteers. The modern myth of entrepreneurship hides the violence at capitalism’s roots: enclosure, genocide, forced labour. The original start-up capital was often stolen land and stolen people.

Even today, entrepreneurship relies heavily on inherited wealth, racial and gender privilege, and global labour exploitation. Venture capital funds “visionary” founders while migrant workers clean their offices and build their gadgets. Behind every tech platform is a factory, a warehouse, a mine.

There is no such thing as a self-made billionaire. There is only structural theft, laundered through branding.

Entrepreneurship Is Capitalism Rebranded

The entrepreneur is marketed as an outsider—a rebel disrupting the system. But in reality, entrepreneurship is capitalism distilled to its purest form.

It celebrates private ownership, competition, and profit accumulation. It rewards individualism, scarcity thinking, and hyper-productivity. It demands we treat every moment of our lives as an opportunity to optimise and monetise.

Entrepreneurs are taught to treat people as markets, needs as niches, and care as a service you can charge for. The business model becomes the lens through which all human activity is filtered.

Start a podcast, not a union.
Sell herbal tea blends, not mutual aid.
Build an app for loneliness, don’t challenge the atomisation that causes it.

The system doesn’t want you to question why the world is broken. It wants you to build a product that pretends to fix it.

Hustle Culture Is the New Discipline

Under industrial capitalism, discipline came from the clock, the manager, the factory bell. Today, we wear our bosses in our pockets. The discipline is internalised.

Entrepreneurship culture is hustle culture: wake up at 5am, sacrifice your weekends, work 80 hours now to “live like a boss” later. It’s the Protestant work ethic with an Instagram filter. Burnout is a badge of honour. Exhaustion is reframed as passion.

This culture weaponises autonomy. It says: if you’re still poor, you didn’t hustle hard enough. If your mental health is crumbling, you didn’t meditate hard enough. If your product failed, it’s your fault—not the economy, not systemic inequality, not the parasitic rentier class.

Hustle culture turns systemic failure into personal shame.

In place of solidarity, it gives you self-help. In place of community, it gives you branding. In place of revolution, it gives you marketing funnels.

Entrepreneurship Reinforces Inequality

Start-ups don’t democratise wealth—they concentrate it. The tech industry is a prime example. A handful of founders reap unimaginable profits while workers are casualised, underpaid, and overworked. Gig economy “entrepreneurship” turns taxi drivers and delivery workers into algorithmically managed serfs.

In the Global South, micro-entrepreneurship is pushed as “development” while structural adjustment and debt traps keep countries impoverished. Selling second-hand clothes or SIM cards on the street isn’t empowerment—it’s survival in the wreckage of neoliberalism.

Even when entrepreneurship is presented as a tool for marginalised people—like Indigenous, Black, queer, or disabled entrepreneurs—it often ends up co-opting resistance into the marketplace. Cultural traditions, identities, and struggles are commodified for profit. Authenticity becomes a marketing asset.

Representation is not liberation. One oppressed person with a brand is not a threat to capitalism. It’s often a way for capitalism to absorb, sanitise, and repackage dissent.

The Logic of Entrepreneurship Is Anti-Communal

Entrepreneurship teaches people to see other people as competitors. If someone starts a community garden, you start a branded organic food business. If someone gives things away, you figure out how to monetise that service.

Scarcity becomes a business opportunity. Generosity becomes a threat.

This undermines social solidarity. Instead of sharing knowledge, we “protect our intellectual property.” Instead of organising collectively, we look for “market edge.” Even in social justice spaces, the logic of competition creeps in: who gets the grant, who gets the platform, who gets the followers.

This is no accident. Entrepreneurship atomises us. It trains us to hustle individually rather than act collectively. It replaces collective power with personal branding.

Under capitalism, even care work is being pulled into the market. Coaching, wellness, therapy—all increasingly commodified, all increasingly reserved for those who can pay. But healing is not a service. Community is not a business.

We need care that’s mutual, not monetised.

We Don’t Need More Bosses—We Need No Bosses

Entrepreneurship is often sold as an alternative to wage labour. “Don’t work for a boss—be your own boss.” But this just shifts the exploitation.

Entrepreneurs become their own tyrants, internalising capitalist discipline. And when they succeed, they hire others—becoming bosses themselves. They reproduce the same hierarchies they supposedly escaped.

We don’t need new bosses. We need no bosses. We don’t need more CEOs. We need co-operatives. We need collective ownership of land, resources, and labour. We need structures where no one accumulates power or profit at the expense of others.

Anarcho-communism offers a different model: worker self-management, federated decision-making, community control, solidarity economics. Not everyone clawing their way to the top of a pyramid—but dismantling the pyramid entirely.

Creativity Without Capitalism

Let’s be clear: we are not against creativity. We are not against initiative, invention, or passion. We want people to bake, build, brew, design, craft, plant, paint, and experiment. But we want that freed from the crushing pressures of profit and market survival.

Creativity under capitalism is distorted. Instead of asking “what does the world need?” we’re forced to ask “what can I sell?”

Art becomes content. Innovation becomes disruption. Culture becomes brand identity.

We want a world where creativity is shared, not sold. Where everyone has time, space, and resources to create—not just those who can monetise their talent. Where skills are passed on freely, not hidden behind paywalls. Where no one has to starve to be an artist.

In short: we want to socialise the means of expression, not just the means of production.

Alternatives: Mutual Aid, Co-operatives, Commons

So what does an anarcho-communist response look like in practice?

We reject the capitalist path of entrepreneurship and instead build systems rooted in mutual aid and solidarity. Examples include:

Worker co-operatives run democratically, without bosses, where surplus is shared.
Land trusts and food commons that provide for community need rather than market demand.
Mutual aid networks where people meet each other’s needs without conditions or profit.

Skillshares, hackerspaces, fablabs, and open-source communities where innovation is decentralised and shared.
Community currencies and resource libraries that challenge private ownership and enable non-monetary exchange.

These alternatives don’t replicate the logic of the market. They replace it. They are not about making the system more humane—they are about making it obsolete.

Entrepreneurship Is Not Liberation—It’s Adaptation

Capitalism survives by adapting. It doesn’t fear criticism—it absorbs it. That’s how we ended up with “feminist” venture capitalists, “green” start-ups, “ethical” banks, and “woke” billionaires.

Entrepreneurship is part of this co-option. It offers the illusion of autonomy while leaving the core structure of capitalism intact. It tells the poor and oppressed that their liberation lies in building a brand, not tearing down the system that exploits them.

Liberation cannot be bought. It cannot be pitched. It cannot be monetised.

We will not find freedom by branding ourselves better within capitalism. We will find freedom by destroying the conditions that force us to brand ourselves in the first place.

From Individual Escape to Collective Liberation

Entrepreneurship tells you to “bet on yourself.” We say: “bet on each other.”

Don’t climb the ladder. Kick it down.
Don’t build a brand. Build a commune.
Don’t pitch an idea to investors. Share it with your comrades.
Don’t dream of unicorns. Dream of revolution.

The path out of exploitation is not paved with business plans. It’s built through struggle, solidarity, and shared power. We don’t need more start-ups. We need shutdowns—of the rentier class, the corporate state, and the myth of meritocracy.

We reject the false freedom of the marketplace. We fight for the real freedom of the commons.

In a world where everything is commodified, to create without profit is rebellion. To organise without hierarchy is revolution.

We don’t want to be the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. We want to abolish the conditions that make such people possible.